Computer-generated music based on electrical recordings of brain activity during wakefulness or sleep. Those are taken from multiunit recordings of 8 neurons in cerebral cortex (Destexhe et al., J Neurosci, 1999). A given neuron was associated to a fixed tone, and every time this neuron fires, a note is emitted. The "melody" produced gives an idea about the distributed firing activity of those neurons. The files were converted in MP3 from MIDI; "sleeping" means slow-wave sleep (deep sleep), "REM" means "rapid-eye movement sleep" (where most dreams occur) and "Poisson-Wake" is a randomly-generated stream of notes with the same statistics as for "Wake". Interestingly, the firing of one isolated neuron during wakefulness is undistinguishable from that of random (Poisson) activity, but the distributed activity (ie, the "melody") is clearly different. This suggests that what makes our brains non-random is not in the firing pattern, but lies in the respective timing of the firing activity of different neurons... (Author: Alain Destexhe, CNRS, France)


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Artist/Composer: Alain Destexhe
Date: 2006-04-07
Keywords: computer music; brain activity; neurons; spikes; wake; sleep; REM sleep; experimental

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